The PlayStation Vita “Just Didn’t Reach Critical Mass” in the US or Europe, Says Layden

In addition to Horizon Zero Dawn, PlayStation 4 Pro, PlayStation VR, and E3 2017, the recent interviews with Sony Interactive Entertainment America President Shawn Layden and SIE Europe President Jim Ryan also featured discussions about the PlayStation Vita.

Layden told The Verge that the Vita is still a viable platform in Japan and Asia, but the audience size in the West wasn’t big enough for them to keep building for it:

Vita is still a viable platform, chiefly in the Japanese and Asian markets. We still have developers in Japan who are building for that platform. But it just didn’t get over the hump in Europe and America. It’s hard to know exactly why, but it didn’t garner a large enough audience here for us to continue to build for it.

Glixel noted that we definitely won’t a PS Vita resurgence at E3 2017 (Sony only mentioned PS4 and PSVR in a recent blog post), and Ryan said in their interview, “The Vita still sells in Japan and some parts of Asia, but it’s not an active line for us in the West.”

Time, meanwhile, noted that a PS Vita successor isn’t in the cards, and Layden offered up more potential reasons for the poor sales in the West:

To be honest, the Vita just didn’t reach critical mass in the US or Western Europe. I don’t know if it was that it was more technology people had to carry around, or more things to charge, or whether their phone or tablet were taking care of that. But once the content slowed in that pipeline, it became hard to keep the Vita as a going concern.

Why do you think the Vita failed to garner a huge audience in the West?